“The God Hypothesis”

A tidal pool on the southern coast of New South Wales, Australia. Charles Darwin proposed that life on Earth may have begun in just such a place. (Wikimedia Commons)

From Keith Ward, Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins (Oxford: Lion, 2008), continuing with a line of thinking that I mentioned in my earlier blog post, “‘Personal Explanation'”:

The God hypothesis, at its simplest, is the hypothesis that personal explanation is not reducible to scientific explanation, and that it is prior to scientific explanation. . . . Put another way, mind is prior to matter. Mind causes matter to exist, as a means of bringing into being a set of states that are desired and enjoyed by that mind, or that can be desired and enjoyed by other minds that may form a shared community. (80)

[I]f the universe is rational, God almost certainly exists. Far from belief in God being some sort of irrational leap of faith, it is the most rational hypothesis there is; and perhaps it is the only plausible and sure foundation of the rationality of the universe that science presupposes. (81-82)

It’s not inappropriate, in this context, to think of the doctrine of the divine logos, which is famous, of course, from the opening verses of the Gospel of John but which is also characteristic of John’s rough contemporary, the Jewish Middle Platonist philosopher and biblical commentator Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 BC to ca. 50 AD). It is a rich term, meaning not only “word” but “speech,” “discourse,” “proportion,” “reason,” and so forth.